Some of the Best Analysts I Ever Worked With Were Product Managers

Some of the best data scientists and analysts I’ve ever worked with were product managers and engineers.

Analytical thinking, the scientific method, using data to be less wrong about what’s going on. These are universal skills. They are not reserved for a specific team or title. They have been around for hundreds of years, across every discipline you can think of, used by the curious, the speculative, and the people who can’t leave a question alone.

The tools built the barriers

Somewhere along the way, tools and technology superpowered our ability to think this way. They also built barriers to entry. You had to specialize in technical skills just to get at it. SQL, Python, enough statistics to trust what you were looking at, knowing where the data actually lived and who to ask for access.

Barriers that required expensive degrees, or a commitment to one narrow profession inside a company. Barriers driven by gatekeeping and company politics too. I’ve met some nasty data managers in my day.

Even worse, somewhere in there, some of us got so focused on mastering the tools that we stopped doing the thinking the tools were meant to support.

The tools are taking them down again

It’s interesting that technology is what will likely break those barriers back down and open everyone up to thinking again.

And it’s more interesting that, used lazily, it could drain those same people of their drive to think, as they hand it over to the tool itself.